


Drabbles of Doom

by BlackMajjicDuchess



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Battlefield, Death, Destruction, Disasters, Doom, Drabble, Drabble Collection, Gen, Illnesses, Rain, Winter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-22
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-03-19 02:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 1,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3592323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackMajjicDuchess/pseuds/BlackMajjicDuchess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I needed a warm up to ease back into writing things, so I settled on drabbles. Just like the title suggests, they will mostly be centered upon doom, darkness and devastation. </p><p>Tags, warnings, and ratings may change.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Periphery

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CountessMillarca](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CountessMillarca/gifts), [DreamingDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamingDragon/gifts).



> My wrists have been a major hindrance to writing lately--soreness and ache, on its way to early arthritis (I'm starting physical therapy on Tuesday). About 2 weeks now. My friends, CountessMillarca and DreamingDragon, made me promise not to write anything until they were all sorted out.
> 
> Truth be told, I had to duel Countess for the right to write these little drabbles. She made me promise not to write any more than 2K words today. 
> 
> But it's been too long since I wrote anything, and the longer I don't write, the antsier I've become. I had to do something. This is the result.
> 
> My drabbles are exactly 100 words (so Scrivener says). This is the first time I have written drabbles. Enjoy.

A presence lingers like a flicker at the corners of the eyes. Malevolent and cloying, but with the aura of a thing trying to seem minute. It dances in the shadows of the never-seen. One glance, it flees. There’s the sense about the air that to lay eyes upon it would be the most wondrous or most horrific instant of a lifetime. Mystery everlasting. Better for the naive watcher that the thick ink of either dreams or nightmares is never captured. Let it dust away upon a breeze. Let it remain a wispy memory, both fond and troubling forevermore.  


	2. Aftermath

Disaster leaves a sugar trail in its wake. Shards of glass, ground to dust, the beach sand of broken things. Voracious fires replace summer sunshine, blackening flesh instead of lightly browning. Bodies exposed—inside out and messy—and prostrate, limbs akimbo at artistic angles. The canvas of devilry, painted in red and ash until the hour wind and water blank the slate. Destruction is loud and angry, timpanic booms of warning, the cymbal crash of puncture, the chime of fractured mirrors. The sound of doom is silence, unholy and untouchable and without witness. 

The day is warm. The sand sparkles.


	3. Anointed

Darkness is a nightmare shroud that swallows on all sides. The faintest glimmer of moonlight shows but one thing between you both: two crooked fingers and a crescent of thumb, glistening wetly but black. It is all that can be seen and so it lures the eye. It is only because of this that you can see that the color is not black, but red. The deepest, purest red. Lifeblood red, sticky and stubborn and beckoning. Copper laces the air, bathes the nostrils. Ice in your veins, freezing. Paralyzing. The half-closed fist slowly lifts, graces your brow. Anointed. Cursed. 

 


	4. Unclean

 

Water coiled around the flesh like glass threads, slithering over dank oil not even soap could remove. It stroked along coiled muscle like wet silk, the single point of beauty in an otherwise nefarious world. Grey, sodden clouds above—dirtied sky—black and smoldering earth below, hissing disapproval. Quiet, calm, and undeterred, the water washed. A stubborn, deaf and dumb nurse on a killing field, thin-lipped, with the cold, iron grip of a firm _no_. Tense and unmoved, within and without, he closed his eyes and allowed it. Why not? 

As if the rain could wash away the taint. 


	5. Winter

Winter nips the ears with demon fangs, crystallizes blood, screams across skin unlucky enough to be left exposed. The earth is glassy with the sheen of ice, blinding the eyes like mirrors beneath the bright glare of a lying sun. The light is as cold as the dusky blue of full moon winter. Powder snow and arctic bite. 

‘Beautiful,’ said with awe, but it is the art of dying. Barren, blank world. The warm-blooded… frozen to death. Anything that _would_ move is as still as the paralyzed surface of the water. It is the end. It is the beginning.


	6. Terminal

Just a sore throat, even if it is a bad one, and his first thought is expected. _I’m dying._ He always thinks this, be it a bruise or a headache. Except that this time, it’s true.

It becomes shrapnel in the lungs, blood in the bowels, head ticking like a time bomb. A nuke to the system.

 _Treatment_ is pity and poking. _Medicine_ , acid in the veins.

He knows death is near because he smells it. Stink wraith. Garbage hawk. Doom, vaporized, is the most wretched scent there is.

Dying isn’t special. One minute he is, and then he isn’t.


	7. Hunger

The hunger is everything. It chews his spirit, bites his heart. When that runs out, it gnaws itself. Every part of him is starving, gnashing teeth and gluttonous, gaping maw. His very cells are empty vacuums for anything that can be swallowed. Soulless and creeping, he is a wretched demon set free to destruct. The effort it takes to ignore only fuels the insatiable lust for sustenance. Anything. _Everything_. The cost matters not.

He hates himself. He hates himself because he surrenders to his ravenous, fathomless void and finds comfort there. No one is safe. _No one._

He fears solitude. 


	8. Suffocation

Panic and portent tighten like a loop of steel wire around the throat. That’s it, the end of air, of the circular pattern of _breath in, breath out,_ the end of life. It is _this moment_ that is strange. The end is a countdown and the minutes and seconds are The Great Unknown. 

But there is _one_ number guaranteed— _zero._

Pulse pounds in the brain, ticking off hidden digits with blood slush sounds. 

Panic rises, a building geyser whose grand debut will never be seen.

Reverse time bomb. The end is a whimper, not a bang. 

No. Not even that. 


	9. Silence

The silence is maddening. Ears strained and yearning for a sign of life. Any life. The friends who are lost, the enemy who hunts. Instead there is only nothing. Dark, foreboding void, swallowing all sound until the cavernous howl in the ears becomes madness imagined. Or is it not? If shadows had a sound, if evil had a name, it is this. Silence _deceives_.

_There is nothing there._

_There is nothing._

Except there is. Darkness has substance, thick and silken. Silence has sound, the inverse of noise. The flat-line reverberation of space says it all. Secrets revealed. Conclusion… imminent.


	10. Drowning

The water yawns open and drags down, down. The view from below is lovely. There is a peaceful absence of sound, the flickering candlelight of the sun beyond the veil, the serenity of solitude. Rays of light cut the gloom like reaching arms, yet lack the flesh to grasp.To rescue. 

Water’s embrace is crushing. The swaying glow burns the lungs. There is a distant roar in the brain. The sound of death racing toward, and of life dashing away.

The instinct to breathe is the wrong one. Instead of memory, last moments are spent in panic. The light winks out. 


	11. Death

She was light, sugar, and warmth. A creature he would never be allowed to understand. What fascinated him was her innocence. What confused him was that she loved him. Words were never said, breath was never shared, hearts were never exchanged.

But she loved him. It was evident in the comfortable quiet and the spark in her eyes. Hidden in the sentences she never finished. She was, quite literally, Life.

As Death, he was doomed to pervade her shadows. If he touched her, she would wither. If he kissed her, she would suffer.

If he loved her, she would die.


	12. Fear

She is chased by nightmares invisible, and though she never sees them, the terror is real, disruptive of her routine. Her heart pounds, blood races, hot in the veins but cold in her chest. She sucks in air—or tries to—and panics when it catches in her throat instead. Her eyes see everything, every fleeting shadow and dark corner. Someone could hide there. Or _there_.  

She _knows_ there is no one there. She has been told this, medically, understands it to be true. _There is no one there._

But it _feels_ like there is. And long ago, there _was_.


End file.
